Swallowing Melancholia 1

At a boarding school in the North East of England, three boys of ordinary charm, formed a cabal at the centre of a class and successfully invoked the powers of a ragamuffin demon who was fond of tearing people. The music teacher did his best to exorcise it. He tried playing Beethoven’s 9th loudly to the boys in class. He tried trust exercises. He stood up in every Quaker school meeting murmuring imprecations and spells. But nothing helped.


The art teacher asked the children to draw a beautiful country scene, but one of the boys, seeing the demon, drew the hidden landscape of its home instead: a red sun in a dirty sky; the moon too close; a tall metal mast curving upwards, standing on a promontory by an evaporated sea; the sea bed stretching into the distance. The art teacher, puzzled announced: 'I would have like to have given this more marks, however, I can't. This is a pebble on the shore.


Melancholia is a film embedded with healthy irreverence and honest despair spoken in the language of Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergmann and Peter Greenaway. It looks and feels like a poetic philosophical summation. It has this texture to it. It even uses the same opening sequence as Solaris and then burns the Bruegel   Even the gently seething planet approaching is Solaris. 


In the western tradition of occultism, Lars conceals by revealing. Hiding from the critics behind the art of cinema itself, behind the history of Europe refusing to explain. But if we listen to the advice of Jacobus Swart we can easily escape the referential traps. Touch the warm skin and feel the living creature under the duvet, the wedding dress, the tight suit. That's enough.


There is one period of human history that is very hard to look at or even properly acknowledge. The events of almost seventy years ago. That which it is difficult to name. The metaphor for this difficulty is perfectly expressed in the moment Claire looks up for the second time to see the planet Melancholia swelling overhead.


In a reference to the Draughtmen's Contract at the key moment of property transfer in the bridal chamber Justine hops out of the bathroom window, finds the guest assigned to trail her at the wedding, and mounts him with no ceremony.


Claire's husband: controlling, confident, responsible, powerful, patronising, kind, competent: a family man and a success, looks through the telescope and at Melancholia and sees that it will not fly by at all, it will hit. Comically, he freezes in fear. Then steals his wife's sleeping pills, and dies in the stables, in so doing quietening the horses and abandoning his wife and child without thought. His manliness and luster punctured immediately by his inability to deal with despair.


There is a self-help book. I think the woman's name is Brandon Bays. She recommends that you go within to find the source of pain by sensing it. Once you locate the pain go deeper within it and you will discover a black portal. Go through the black portal. Magicians have a name for this action. They have mapped this better, but their knowledge is taboo and no longer salient, it is woven into an old dusty carpet hidden in the attic. The falsely discredited weave of the old internal - external science of the west. Made to disappear.


Lars von Triers film is too complex for some the film critics, like Philip French to bother, perhaps.  "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought" says French; he couldn't be bothered. Von Triers refuses to explain himself. 'You've gotta wanna know.' And the film critics done wanna. Why should they? When you approach Tarkovsky you do so with care. Have the critics who reviewed Melancholia stepped through any dark portals recently? Kirsten Dunst had, before she took the part. It's a useful pre-requisite to have been in a sanatorium, to have been treated for depression.


One of the key moment in all of Tarkovsky's films is the watering of a dead tree. Lars von Triers ends his film with his women and child sheltered in a skeletal Tepee made from the dead wood cut from living trees. Von Triers has no faith. Instead he has resignation.


In Lars Von Triers film Melancholia, Justine says.


'Life on this planet is evil and no one will miss it.'


The boy in Melancholia waits, as so many other children have waited before in wars, for it all to end. He waits in a small magic circle, holding hands tightly with his mother and his aunt. From this circle the tearing demons are banished.


Rightfully, Lars von Triers is not sure. He thought he was a descendant of the victims, but says he is heir to the persecutors and their collaborators. This is the confusion of a European inheritance. It is more honourable to accept it whole. To look up and see the proximity of WW2. How low and close it still hangs in the sky. How rarely do we face up to it, as rarely as we face up to our own death.


*         *         *


In my own case, should I look back at our own little man: Great Uncle Wilhelm? The widows pension was not enough to pay for his education in Frankfurt so he joined the Hitler Youth and subsequently the Luftwaffe, rising to the rank of technical sergeant. His job was to make sure ordinance was neatly packed into German bombers ready for dispatch. Or, instead, should I look back at aunt Else, the opera singer banned from the Vienna stage and radio, betrayed in France, taken to Drancy, deported to Auschwitz (in train wagon number 27) and gassed on arrival.


Should I say, and should my English brothers say, that we are the children of the Nazis or the children of their victims? Or is it better to ignore that half and affirm that we are, principally, the children of the British Empire. We were born in the country which filled its coffers with gold; raised in the country which grew its fine tea and Arabica and we came of age in India.

*         *         *


My mother sang so well that she was required to do so for visiting dignitaries at l’Institution de la Porte du Parc in Paris. But later on, at Kingsmead School in Johannesburg she sang with gusto and the teacher - perhaps she didn't like the sound of the French 'r' -  in a calculated, or a casual, act of cruelty, in front of the rest of the girls said: ‘Don't sing, dear. Just mouth the words.’ From then on, if she sang, she did so breathlessly, with a tremor. 


This is a pebble on the shore.


'Look at me. Listen to me. Wrench yourself out of your torpor and remember, if you love me. Don't make assumptions.'